You’ve lugged your PowerPoint presentation through monotonous meetings, crusty conferences, and corporate carnivals, and for all the blood, sweat, and tears that you shed, you’re rewarded with a sleepy or chatty audience that just isn’t pepped up to bite your meticulously bulleted presentation.
The run of the mill corporate presentation won’t guarantee success. Your pitch needs to hook the right shades of emotion, and that happens only if your business presentation is dazzlingly designed and visually vibrant enough to cut celebratory cakes and sell ingenious ideas.
Not to worry, help is at hand. Experts at PowerPoint design services by PresentationGeeks recommend four designer solutions that escalate any business presentation from awful to awesome within minutes of delivery.
Focus Not on the Details but on the All-Embracing Narrative
Your text is creatively correct and brilliantly bulleted, but you’ll lose the war if you aren’t battle-ready with the all-embracing narrative. The most successful business presentations follow the story reciting model made famous in movies and novels. The message has to be sparkling and vibrant enough to engage the audience’s undivided attention and set the stage for cross-selling your idea, product or concept. So, instead of wasting your time refining reams of boring text, focus on developing the storyboard that sells.
Start boldly by presenting the problem (in your niche) that the audience can identify with, and set the stage for rolling out solutions that get the audience thinking, “yeah, I faced a similar problem” graduating step by step to “that’s exactly what I need.”
Ask creative directors, and they’ll tell you that effective presentations are more about developing rhythm, building cadence, and the pacing of your narrative as you transform the story from boring to exciting.
If there are multiple slides to cover, introduce compelling visuals to break the monotony and keep the audience on its toes. If five text-based slides can be compressed into one visual, do it.
Use the Visual Cue to Lead Your Audience to Your Chosen Destination
You can’t score with a textually rich presentation that looks and sounds like a thesis aiming for a doctorate. Keep the fine print to the barest minimum – your conversational style of delivery is enough to fill the knowledge gaps. Take comfort in visual expression because mankind is genetically programmed to respond to visual stimuli more than print media.
The visual stimulus keeps the dialogue open-ended and the conversation ticking. Getting the audience to respond keeps listeners fully invested in you. Use bold fonts against colorful pictures or moving images to convey messages as fast as the human retina registers the cue.
Visuals can be great backups when your conversation flags and you want to bring the audience’s attention back to the primary topic. Soon enough, the audience loses consciousness of the people, technology, and gadgets surrounding them and get sucked into your world of powerful imagery and wordplay.
“Keep It Simple Sweetie, Keep It Organized” Isn’t Just a Cliché
In the arena of business presentations, the “stuffed goose presentation” is to be avoided like the plague. You know, the ones that are packed to the core with every kind of information imaginable, and then some more. These “academic sermons” usually end up in the “slaughterhouse” of audience inattention probably like the original goose. Audiences love business presentations that are visually appealing, neatly organized, with big ideas simply explained.
Keep to an orderly procession of printed slides interspersed with lots of visuals and a neat storyline that runs in parallel creating an invisible ship that ports passengers safely to a welcoming beach.
Core Principle of Successful Business Presentations: Don’t Push the Default Mode, Be Original
Avoid committing PowerPoint presentations to default template designs that market the one-size-fits-all approach. Chances are that the audience will be familiar with the template, and you lose significant points in the originality stakes. It’s always safer to create a new beginning from scratch no matter how bothersome that may sound.
You’ll be appreciated for originality if you take time off to study and know your audience beforehand. Are you addressing powerful policymakers, an audience of maturing millennials, or a younger more impressionable group? It’s important because knowing the audience makes it easier to alter the style, tone, and delivery of the presentation, so you end up speaking the language the audience is comfortable with.
Conclusion
Approach a business presentation as you lovingly apply a paintbrush to a welcoming canvas. All the lines, designs, and colors that seemed unrelated merge into one colorful painting that awes the senses.
In the same manner, present your story piece by piece, gradually building up to an eventful conclusion where all elements merge harmoniously into a rich storyline with a befitting climax.
The audience should feel awed that they’ve just witnessed a logo in expression, a brand in action, and they’ll want what you pitch. That’s when you know you’ve hit a home run.
